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Comment by lentil_soup | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if I am being ignorant, but how's the military a socialist thing?

> Every day before dawn, brave men and women of different races and backgrounds rise as one, united by a common cause. They march together in formation, kept in step by their voices joined in song. These workers leave their communal housing arrangements and go toil together “in the field.” While they are out doing their day’s labor, their young are cared for in subsidized childcare programs. If they hurt themselves on the job, they can count on universal health care. Right under your nose, on the fenced-in bases you drive past on your way to work or see on the TV news, a successful experiment in collectivization has been going on for years.

-- http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/21/troops-of-t...

> The military is innately hierarchical, yet it nurtures a camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees. This is a rare enclave of single-payer universal health care, and it continues with a veterans’ health care system that has much lower costs than the American system as a whole.

-- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=...

I'm surprised this isn't obvious to most people.

I also find libertarian soldiers extremely amusing.

(shove the healthcare part aside for a second) to a certain degree, all firms are 'socialist', because they are banding together to not compete with each other. This is the central interesting problem in the 'theory of the firm' which deals with how in a capitalist system groups of individuals band together to not compete. This definition, then is meaningless. Socialism is when a central authority organizes the distribution of labor and resources under the threat of force.

As for the healthcare, universal healthcare for soldiers is a horribly malfunctioning system in the US, and it is unlikely to change anytime soon.

It's only malfunction is being poorly funded. The definition is not meaningless. Companies are pretty socialist.

no it's not. The organization is corrupt from the top. My father is a medium-level executive there. Years ago, he reported that there was black mold in the senior care facility and exposed several million dollars of overbilling by doctors. For his troubles, he was rubber-roomed (paid six salaries to sit in a room with no windows and no responsibilities). This is not an incident that made the major media. Other, more publicised problems exist, in the Phoenix office, and notably at Walter Reed, during the Bush tenure and wars in afghanistan and iraq. But if you seriously have such a belief in the VA, GO ASK 5 VETERANS what they think of it.

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